Alright, my offering this week comes from a former president, which considering the news, seems timely. Born on February 6th, 1911, this man grew up poor. He went to Eureka college, and graduated in 1932, working as a sports announcer for awhile before moving to Hollywood and becoming an actor. You all probably know who I’m talking about by now… and why it would be easy to respect this man. He died June 5th, 2004, but he had many good things to say before that happened, one of which was this:

“We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.” – Ronald Reagan.

Alright, no new responses, but plenty of likes. I guess that’s something to go on. So continuing the tale. Five minutes on the clock, and away we go:

Josh did notice something was wrong, of course. There was no way to completely disguise everything that had happened, even for him. But Josh spent more than a few minutes trying to figure out exactly what was different, and when he finally spoke the best he could come up with was:

“Have you lost weight?”

He nodded over his pancakes. He had, in fact, lost weight. Along with a few other things.

“I think you should leave today. I’ve already sent the standard payment to your account, plus a hazard fee I consider fair.”

He had never stiffed business associates; it was a bad habit to get into. Josh thought all the way through and entire pancake, absently chewing as he stared at his face.

“No way, I’m not going to just run out now. You’re sick, and whoever is trying to kill you is after a stone that makes people sick. Probably to put it in the water supply or something. I may not be on the side of angels, but I can’t really let something like that slide. So when they find you, and you know they probably will, I’ll be there to drive us both out; you don’t have to pay me more than my standard rates.”

He didn’t bother to insult Josh by asking again. He was too busy fighting off the urge to tell Josh that the stone poisoning someone else would no longer be a problem. After all, he wasn’t entirely sure that was true yet.

And time, and four minutes, 38 seconds. See you next week, if you’re reading this.

This week’s offering is from the psych corner. One of the fathers of psychotherapy and a founder of an entire branch of thought in that area, he was born the 26th of July in 1875 in Kesswil Switzerland. The school of thought he founded was analytical psychology. He wrote a ton… I know, I had to actually read it all in college. He died the 6th of June 1961, in Kusnacht Switzerland.

In my opinion, he was wrong about a lot of things… but this quote isn’t one of them:

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung.

Alright, so I posted on a Tuesday to let me know if I needed to change up what I was doing. I even waited a week; no one voted. Absolutely no one even commented on it. So the only conclusion I can reasonably take from that is that no one is reading it.

If they are, and simply didn’t care enough to respond, well that’s kinda screwed up.

So, last chance. If no one responds, this time, I’m just going to assume the snippets of fiction I’m writing are not liked, and stop writing them. But for now, five minutes on the clock:

He woke up before Josh, and that was a good thing. It was a good thing because padding through the apartment that was his current safe house was a mistake. He’d had to shrug his pants off in the bed; they had tangled up somehow. The bathroom mirror, stern judge that it was, showed a teenaged girl barely covered by an overly large dress shirt staring back at him. Or maybe an androgynous boy; different angles changed what was seen.

He should be freaking out. He knew he should; so why wasn’t he? He looked nothing like he used to, he looked nothing like the age he was, and wasn’t in shock. He just… didn’t care. Calmly he locked the door and took a shower, taking out his disguise kit and disguised himself as himself.

Josh woke up as he was making breakfast.

And that’s it; time spent is four minutes and 59 seconds. See you next week, with either another snippet or poetry.

My goal with this blog is to offend everyone in the world at least once with my words… so no one has a reason to have a heightened sense of themselves. We are all ignorant, we are all found wanting, we are all bad people sometimes.